Mixed Race Studies

Race: Social Fact, Biological Fiction

Focus on Adoption
Volume 17, Number 3
June/July 2009
pages 16-17

Andrew Martindale, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
University of British Columbia

Andrew Martindale, an adoptive parent, and assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, explains that the concept of race is man-made and, though it holds enormous power, has no biological basis.

…Why races exist
If races are not biological divisions, why do they exist? The answer is complex and partly that races exist because people want to believe they exist.  Although race identities can lead to racism, they also have considerable value in social terms. People who have been marginalized historically, based on a flawed concept of race, find solidarity with people who share the same history. Ironically, the concept of race can have a positive role in repudiating racism. For this reason, the concept of race is not likely to disappear any time soon…

Read the entire article here.

Legal Transplants: Slavery and the Civil Law in Louisiana

University of Southern California Legal Studies Working Paper Series
Working Paper 32
May 2009
37 pages

Ariela J. Gross, Professor of Law and History
University of Southern California Law School

Can Louisiana tell us something about civil law vs. common law regimes of slavery? What can the Louisiana experience tell us about a civil law jurisdiction “transplanted” in a common-law country? Louisiana is unique among American states in having been governed first by France, then by Spain, before becoming a U.S. territory and state in the nineteenth century. Unlike other slave states, it operated under a civil code, first the Digest of 1808, and then the Code of 1825. With regard to the regulation of slaves, these codes also incorporated a “Black Code,” first adopted in 1806, which owed a great deal to both French and Spanish law. Comparisons of Louisiana with other slave states tend to emphasize the uniqueness of New Orleans’ three-tier caste system, with a significant population of gens de couleur libre (free people of color), and the ameliorative influence of Spanish law. This reflects more general assumptions about comparative race and slavery in the Americas, based on the work of Frank Tannenbaum and other historians of an earlier generation, who drew sharp contrasts between slavery in British and Spanish America. How does the comparison shift if we turn our attention away from slave codes, where Tannenbaum focused, to the “law in action”? At the local level, one can see the way slaves took advantage of the gap between rules and enforcement, and to fathom racial meanings at the level of day-to-day interactions rather than comparisions of formal rules. This essay surveys three areas of law involving slaves – manumission, racial identity, and “redhibition” (breach of warranty) – to compare Louisiana to other jurisdictions, and particularly to its common-law neighbors.

…The first major slave codes in the North American colonies date to 1680-82. They draw numerous distinctions on the basis of race rather than status, including laws against carrying arms and against leaving the owner’s plantations without a certificate. A penalty of thirty lashes met “any Negro” who “lift up his hand against any Christian.” In 1691, English women were fined for having a bastard child with a negro. In 1705, all mulatto children were made servants to the age of 31 in Virginia; Maryland and North Carolina adopted the same rule within the next several decades.

By the time the U.S. became a republic, only those of African descent were slaves, and all whites were free. Yet there were a significant number of individuals and entire communities of mixed ancestry with ambiguous racial identity along the Eastern seaboard. In the southeast, Indian tribes both absorbed runaway slaves and, in the late eighteenth century, adopted African slavery. In addition to the 12,000 people designated in the Census as “free people of color” in Virginia, there were 8000 in Maryland in 1790, 5000 in North Carolina, 1800 in South Carolina, and 400 in Georgia…

Read the entire paper here.

Grad student explores questions of race through digital technology

News & Events
York Univeristy, Toronto, Ontario
2010-01-28

The technology to turn oneself into a mixed-race avatar might be confined to movies, but Brian Banton plays with racial manipulations of himself online, wrote the Toronto Star (online) Jan. 27 [2010] in a story that included five photos of him.

As a York graduate student, he explores questions of racial hybridity as related to corporate design. Much of the work is obscurely theoretical, Banton says. “But I also want to be playful. (Mixed race) is a serious issue but I don’t want to be heavy-handed.”..

Read the entire article here.

Students’ growing refusal to state a race on forms frustrates school officials

Sacramento Bee
2010-01-18

Stephen Magagnini

Sacramento, California — About half of the 37 students in teacher Jeanne Kirchofer’s Laguna Creek High School classroom, who span nearly every combination of race and ethnicity, have joined the growing number of California students who decline to state a race on official forms and tests…

“I’m not saying we’re going to forget where we came from, but we can all see similarities from different hardships,” Belcher said. By eliminating racial categories—and racial consciousness—”we can make racial hatred go away,” she said.

Eighteen classmates agreed. “If we were all one race, then there wouldn’t be any racism,” said Mike Obi, 14, whose roots are Italian and Nigerian. He said his parents declined to state his race on his school registration form.

“We shouldn’t be judged by our race,” said senior Jessica Mae Belcher, 17, whose roots are African and Cherokee. She prefers “none of the above” because “we’re all different, but we’re all the same, too.”..

…From 2006 to 2009, the number of Elk Grove Unified School District students whose parents listed their race as “multiple/no response” went from 500 to 6,200 — a twelve-fold jump in just three years, the California Department of Education says. About one of every 10 of the district’s students now list race as “multiple/no response.”

There’s also been a dramatic rise statewide. Data show the number of K-12 students listing their race as “multiple/no response” has jumped 70 percent, from 124,000 in 2006 to 210,000 last year…

…Senior Candice Renkin, 17,—who identifies herself as white/European American—said it’s important to close the achievement gap. “By ignoring racial categories, it makes the problem worse because people can be racist and there’s no way to quantify it.” …

Read the entire article here.

Hideously diverse Britain: the college where histories collide

The Guardian
2010-01-10

Hugh Muir

It was 1940 and the 200 students of South West Essex Technical College posed ramrod straight on the sharply inclined steps; ties stiff, uniforms crisp. They were RAF ­cadets learning science and ­engineering at the place that was dubbed the People’s University. Unsurprisingly, those pictured were all white.

The place is called Waltham Forest College nowadays and the grand steps remain imposing. The porticos, by sculptor Eric Gill, have been lovingly preserved.

But last week, when the east London college recreated that recently discovered archive photograph, everything else was different. The formation was identical to that created with military precision all those years ago, but lining the steps were 200 students from ­another generation, another century. White Britons, black Britons, teenagers of Asian and African and Mediterranean and Eastern European descent. A student body with links to every continent on the planet. Speakers of 76 different ­languages. Each standing out in the cold to make a statement. “I told them it was their job to represent their era, just as the cadets in 1940 were symbolic of that time,” said lecturer Gaverne Bennett. “They bought into it.”…

Read the entire article and view the photographs here.

College applications in a post-race world: Admissions process will soon need to address class concerns

GW Hatchet
Independent Student Paper of George Washington University
2010-01-14

Evan Schwartz, Columnist

In a recent editorial for The Boston Globe, columnist Neal Gabler railed against what he referred to as “the college admissions scam” and a perceived bias in admission board selection against, well, everyone. Gabler made it seem as though anyone who is not a privileged white high school student has no chance of getting into an Ivy League or comparable university.

…Racial identity has been changing dramatically in the last few years, perhaps punctuated by the election of a mixed-race president of the United States. The concept of “whiteness” in this country has become more complicated, especially given the influx of Hispanic immigrants and the decreasing stigma attached to mixed-race couples. Over a third of the U.S. population is now composed of minority groups, and the Census Bureau predicts that white people will have a far less pronounced majority in the next several decades….

Read the entire article here.

Six degrees of Princeton’s African-American history: America writ small

Princeton Alumni Weekly
Rally ‘Round the Cannon
2010-01-13

Gregg Lange, Class of 1970

The New York Times’ recent genealogy study of Michelle Obama ’85, noting for the first time her slave and mixed-race heritage, seemingly surprised a broad swath of the populace. This indicates that we here in the History Corner of the World haven’t been doing our jobs very well. The complex intertwining of peoples and cultures living side by side for hundreds of years, their humanness grotesquely masked by slavery and then gratuitous segregation, is as near a universal experience as you can find in the United States. We were all involved; we are all affected. Get used to it.  

It is, for a nearby example, pretty much common knowledge that the saga of African-Americans at Princeton began in World War II, and gained no effective traction until the Goheen administration in the 1960s. A whites-only world, if ever there was one.

Let me instead tell you a story more than 200 years old…

Read the entire article here.

Geek Out: Mixed Race in America

University of Californa, Berkeley
Lawrence Hall of Science
2010-02-10, 19:00 to 22:00 PST (Local Time)

Geek Discourse
Tour the “Race: Are We So Different?” exhibit and participate in a discussion facilitated by Dr. Victoria Robinson of the UC Berkeley Ethnic Studies and American Cultures programs on what it means to be mixed race in America. Authors of the book “Blended Nation” Mike Tauber and Pamela Singh will present several photographs and stories from the book…

For more information click here.

‘Multiracial Identity’ documentary film and discussion

Portland State University
228 Smith Union
Wednesday, 2010-03-03, from 18:30-21:00 PST (Local Time)

This new documentary explores the social and political impact of adding a Multiracial Category (the fastest growing demographic in America) as a stand-alone racial group on the US Census. Different racial and cultural groups see multiracialism differently. For some Whites, multiracialism represents the pollution of the White race. For some Blacks it represents an attempt to escape Blackness. And for some Asians, Latinos and Arabs, multiracialism represents the dilution of the culture. Preview this 88-minute film, followed by refreshments and join the discussion with filmmaker Brian Chinhema, Sarah Ross, Director, HONEY (Honoring our New Ethnic Youth) Inc., Thomas Wright, Director, Oregon Council on Multiracial Affairs, and Dana Stone, Adjunct Faculty, University of Oregon Couples & Family Therapy.

Sponsored by Multicultural Center, the Presidents Commission on the Status of Women, and the Center for Academic Excellence. For more information, contact Patrice Hudson, Co-Chair, Presidents Commission on the Status of Women at (503)725-8327 or pjhudson@pdx.edu.

The Cosmic Race by José Vasconcelos: “La Raza Cósmica” and Issues of Racial Diversity and Purity

suite101.com
2010-01-26

Melanie Zoltan, Adjunct Professor of History
Bay Path College

In “The Cosmic Race” (“La Raza Cósmica” in Spanish), José Vasconcelos argues that racial diversity and interbreeding will produce one superior race. Is it code for purity?

While The Cosmic Race (La Raza Cósmica) sounds like the name of a new video game from Nintendo starring Mario and Luigi, this essay (in book form) written by Latin American philosopher José Vasconcelos in 1925 presents arguments on racial diversity and interbreeding that set the intellectual world ablaze when it was published and that continue to be debated by scholars…

Read the entire article here.